Assembling a variable from other variables based on a condition

Question

Hi Gang,

Brain totally not working today.

So, I have a few columns in a table that basically designate whether a certain piece of information WAS or WAS NOT provided by the user.

For example, I have a table with:

| ID | USER | crit1 | crit2 | crit3 | crit4 | etc. |

Now, the record could have a 1 or yes for any of the "critX" fields. I dunno much about math and permutations, but I guess if there were 4 columns, you could have 16 combinations of output. In my real world example I have 16 different criteria, so I can't factor for the output of that mess. I need to write a routine of some sort.

In my example, each of those crit values is going to be evaluated and if the criterion == 1/yes, it will be included in another variable AND have a more human friendly bit of data assigned to it. I am currently pulling each value from the DB an doing something like

### first I pull the values
$mydbarray[crit1] = $cr1;
$mydbarray[crit2] = $cr2;
$mydbarray[crit3] = $cr3;
(etc...)

### then I assign some human friendly text ONLY if the value == 1/yes
if($cr1==1) ($cr1 = "This info is present!";}
if($cr2==1) ($cr2 = "Number two is present!";}
if($cr3==1) ($cr3 = "Three was provided!";}

Now, what I need to do, is collect all that output only if the "IF" fired on true and assemble into a final variable.

So somehow, I want:

$finaloutput = $cr1, $cr2, $cr3;

Obviously that's not valid or what I want, but even if it DID work, it would end up including all the == 0/no instances as well.

So essentially I need a conditional grouping of these variables and I am not getting it.

I was thinking of casting an array and looping through it, but then I was at a loss for including the human intelligible portions...

Some guy at work mentioned an IF statement using bool, but I am not wellversed there.

I would think this is easy, but I've been up all week with the baby. so my brain is broken.

Thanks in advance!!! Rob

Answer 1

Try this:

$finaloutput = '';
if($cr1) $finaloutput .= "This info is present! ";
if($cr2) $finaloutput .= "Number two is present! ";
if($cr3) $finaloutput .= "Three was provided! ";
echo $finaloutput;

You dont need brackets in an if statement if there is only one item inside it. Im not sure if you want commas in the variable though...

Answer 2

Hi Rob,

First of all much of what you wrote is not valid PHP. I will assume you wrote it just to illustrate the point and didn't bother with the syntax.

Here is how to do it:

You take an array in which you will put your texts:

$texts = array();

For each of your criteria you check if they are provided, but add to the array created before:

if($cr1==1) {$texts[] = "This info is present!";}
if($cr2==1) {$texts[] = "Number two is present!";}
if($cr3==1) {$texts[] = "Three was provided!";}
...

In the end you concatenate all your texts with implode:

$finaloutput = implode(', ', $texts);

I prefer the method with implode to the one that just appends to a string because if I want a comma separator I don't get an extra one at the end.

Good luck, Alin